Modeling Humans

by jaketimothy

The people with the most insight into people’s decisions and motivations tend not to be the same people who design models and systems for data. My wife, for example, has a prophetic intuition about people. She “just knows” what someone is up to and why, what’s going on in different relationships. She would never let on how much she sees, even if asked directly, because it would make the person uncomfortable. She also couldn’t read a statistical graphic to save her life. Over the decades, much of the artificial intelligence thought space has been shaped around understanding human intelligence, on metaphysical and biological levels. With the growth of AI and data science in recent years, technology is poised to take immediate advantage of any new insight that can be captured and instrumented into a practical model. Just as there are classic and quantum mechanical models for physics, there are economic, sociological, and psychological models for human behavior. Collaboration between data and relational thinkers on human insight is a great opportunity to push data science forward.